Namco: Tekken 6 went multiplatform due to fan demand

Tekken 6 developer Katsuhiro Harada has revealed that Namco Bandai took the classic fighting series multiplatform in order to appease the fans. In news that will shock nobody, selling more units appears to have been an incentive too.

"Yes, we have developed it PlayStation 1, 2 and now 3, so it is true that we have really grown with the PlayStation brand," Harada told Kikizo in a lengthy interview. "We have a lot of fond memories, and we worked very closely with Mr Kutaragi as well, so we had a really good relationship. We love the platform."

"[But] there are a lot of Xbox users out there at the moment," he went on. "and a great deal of fans who only have an Xbox and really want to play Tekken, which is the number one in the fighting genre. And we just had so many fans that said "we really want to get our hands on it, but can't."

"So we wanted to answer those fans. And it's also the timing at this point - at the moment we have two high spec consoles on the market at the same time; the Xbox has a huge installed base in Europe and America. So it was more about trying to answer the fans' requests and having as many as possible be able to get the game - that was the objective there."

Harada, who serves as (deep breath) Manager of Game Design Section 2, R&D Dept. 1, R&D Div. 1 at the Contents Production Headquarters of Namco Bandai Games Inc, also peeled apart some of the tech powering Tekken's latest outing.

He acknowledged that the trailer Namco screened at E3 2006 lacked the visual impact of certain other games on the show, but gave a very good reason for this - the Tekken 6 trailer was in-engine, rather than a "target" pre-rendering. "We had Tekken Dark Resurrection going on at that point, but we hadn't really had much hands on time with PS3, at all. And where other developers have had kind of pre-rendered stuff that they were showing off on the PS3, we were one of the teams who had real-time footage from the console itself."

In addition to the usual greased-lightning framerate, Tekken 6 offers a more textured, layered graphical experience. "One of the new things we were able to do is that while the game is still running at 60 frames, which it always has, we've added a lot more post-processing effects, for example the motion blur and such," Harada explained.

"So the graphical quality has increased dramatically since then. And actually, the [Soul] Calibur team and even the [Sega] Virtua Fighter team, have had their eyes on motion blur technology, but they've kind of given up on trying to implement that while maintaining 60 frames. So that's something new that we've accomplished this time with Tekken.

"I would say after working on Tekken games for ten years, this is really a great improvement."

Tekken 6: Bloodline Resurrection is down for release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in Autumn 2009.